Test Your Students' Information Literacy IQ

Information Literacy is the ability to know when you need information, to know what kind of information you need, to know where to find this information, to know how to determine if it's good information and to use it effectively. There are a set of Information Literacy standards and those standards are integrated into state curriculum standards.

Thre is a tool available called TRAILS (Tool for Real-time Assessment of Information Literacy Skills). TRAILS is a web-based, multiple choice assessment targeting those Information Literacy skills. If you would like to assess your students' grasp of Information Literacy standards, please see me to schedule a session to test your students.

FactCheckEd.org - Annenberg Classroom Fact Check

I ran across this great site in the Librarians' Internet Index blog feed for FactCheckEd.org - Annenberg Classroom Fact Check. In the site intro, they convey the following mission for their site:

"Our aim is to help students learn to be smart consumers of these messages, to see through the deceptions that they encounter daily, to dig for facts using the Internet and other resources, and to set aside prejudice and weigh evidence logically."

While intended for a high school audience, I think that most of the content could be modified for use with middle school students as well. This site offers a wonderful collection of lesson plans that would be appropriate for all core subject areas, including math (Suspicious Statistics) and science (Listerine). This site will work well with writing argumentative essays, debates and studying media awareness.
There is a topical search for Internet resources and "A Process for Avoiding Deception" for students to consider when conducting research.
The creators have included a helpful little dictionary (really a glossary), encourage you to ask them questions and an open discussion forum in the Faculty Lounge.